Robin watching.

Our garden isn't huge but I'd be lost without it. There's nothing like watching the birds here to give me a wee lift. Nature is like a free tranquilizer.

I love the dawn chorus, too. I'm usually still awake then, and it helps soothe me to sleep, helps shut my brain down and stop it racing. Last night, I heard the first bird at 2.44am. That's early, even for a blackbird!

Let me introduce you to Newton, my regular visitor and friend. I call him Newton after a teacher I had in Primary School, Mrs Newton, who usually had her head leaning over on one side. He's quite tame (which is more than can be said for Mrs Newton). I've almost got him feeding from my hand. Almost. He comes up to about a foot or so away from me, then I give in and put the food on the ground for him. I can't bear to tease him.

At this point in my spying, a second robin came to have a bath. Friend or foe? I wondered....


Then Newton came down to eat... hadn't he seen the other one on his territory?
Uh-oh.....
He took the food to her!Newton has a girlfriend!!!!
Hurray!

More pootling....

...So I cropped that picture thingy I did the other day, and made it into a card:Watcha think?
Certainly looks better smaller, I think.
I punched the flowers out of some of the remaining paper. I only did 6 as this punch is INCREDIBLY hard to press down! I hate punches like that! I think you should be able to try them out in the shop. LOL!

Looking out the window, I spotted this wee fella on the rosemary. Wasn't sure if he was nimbling seeds or insects. Cute, isn't he? Wouldn't pose properly for me though :)...that little distraction got me to dig out this, which I bought about a month ago and still hadn't done anything with. It's a big sheet of gift wrap from Paperchase. Decent weight paper, too, and tons of it for £1:OK £1 is a lot for a piece of wrapping paper that will end up torn up and ignored, but not if you use it in other ways. I've seen craft stamps around with similar bird cage designs on, and this is a much cheaper option to those! Here's the card I made with some of it this afternoon. I used bird stamps from my growing collection of stamps received free with magazines :)I quite like it :) Here's the inside:
Next, here is one I put together as an anniversary card for someone. Can't say who in case they come here and see it. Ha.I had the topper ready a few weeks ago, so it was just a case of deciding on a background. In the end I thought just using a plain brown card was enough.Some swirls inside and a 'congratulations' stuck onto it:
It was nice to do a bit of crafty pootling. I am feeling EXTREMELY hormonal (horMOANal?) right now and I needed calming down. LOL!

Finally, I had run out of blank ATCs. Rather than buy some I thought I'd just cut up some card. They have to be 3.5 x 2.5 inches. Yeah, I know, if I have lined them up I'd have got more out of a sheet of card. But where's the fun in that?I coloured them all with ProMarkers and cut them out. Now I have a wee pile of multi-coloured blank ATCs. Far less frightening than a blank white canvas. You never know, I might even produce some completed ones some time.
Wouldn't it be nice to get a swap going?
Hmmm... I wonder if we could so that... any ideas?